[anecdotal]
luck has nothing to do with being wise.
anyway, I think unwise in this context means that RMS has been right more times than he's been wrong.
And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.
https://banksyexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/LAUGH...
> The average teenage gamer does not care
that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.
Ok, let me reframe it. Do you have any example of anything being adversely affected by the fact that anybody ever laughed at RMS? Sure, he sound profound and far seeing, but his rhetoric is anything but subtle. He’s been way off for about 30 years now.
> And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.
I know what we owe him, but his contribution is long passed now. It does not turn him into a kind of universal genius. He’s outlived his usefulness as far as software freedoms are concerned. These day he’s more of a boogeyman than someone to take seriously, and he’s got only himself to blame.
> that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.
Do you remember what you did when you were in this situation? Personally, I mostly told my parents to fuck off and did whatever I wanted on my side, which was mostly what they did not want me to do. A condescending tone when you tell them what they ought to care about is not going to cut it. And I am saying that as a neck beard father.
But whereas a lot of others think the problems are structural to how society operates, and that fixing it would require rebuilding under a new economic framework, Stallman's only insight is that software you can't modify is the devil. DRM is bad not because it upholds a capitalist supply-and-demand system by restricting theoretically infinite supply, but because you can't modify the .c files yourself or send them to a friend.
It's an extremely limited way of thinking that ignores any external structural or economic motivations, and focuses on an unreasonably small niche subset with a black-and-white moral answer. It sometimes makes good points, mostly accidentally, but it still has a lot of misses, e.g. the religious persistence on "software" leads to programs like the FSF's Respect Your Freedoms with incoherent policies around hardware, firmware, and ROMs, mostly from a place of ignorance.
The free software movement was quickly co-opted by corporations as the "open-source movement" by executives looking to offload their labor costs onto unpaid workers, leading to a lot of under-funded core software infrastructure as corporations rank in the cash. Stallman's "Open Source Misses the Point" essay doesn't talk at all about this, it doesn't talk about the ways that open-source is about externalizing costs, nor about the way that it's leading to maintainer burn-out, it just points out that it's kinda bad that they're releasing stuff under the MIT license instead of the GPL, and would really much prefer if people didn't do that, while not realizing that was the goal all along.
The FSF has very little force in accomplishing their goals; it's a wet paper towel tossed vaguely in the direction of actual change.
To be fair, his position was interesting in the 1980s. But he’s been hopelessly out of touch with the vast majority of computer users since the 1990s. He can keep harping on about the GPL and keep watching the world pass by.
I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise?
> For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust.
The driving force was (and still largely is) protecting copyrighted video content. That is bullshit, of course, but cheaters and video games were far down the priority pile when hardware DRM was designed. Now, it’s all about secure computing and sandboxes, and video games are still pretty much an afterthought.
> And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.
The average teenage gamer does not care. There are things we can do to improve the situation with DRM, but “how do you do fellow kids” from an old neck beard is way off the mark, and indeed laughable.